July 2010
The limits of my — oh, what the hell.
Tristan is right that linguistic determinism is a topic that concerns me. I was actually going to let it go for the moment, because he’s also right that it’s a topic that can get a little convoluted or tiresome. Then I saw this. Rather than attempt to do a piece-by-piece dissection, which I’m probably not qualified to do anyway, I figured I’d make some general observations...
I don’t know if anyone else has experienced this, but when driving, I’ve noticed some spots in the road in the middle distance will sometimes appear as holes, or, more precisely, as a kind of horizontal slices. It looks like a kind of visual glitches, like when you run into a wall in a game and suddenly you’re looking through a building into nothing, as if someone had sliced off...
Eigengrau →
The color of darkness: Eigengrau (German: “intrinsic gray”), also called Eigenlicht (“intrinsic light”), dark light, or brain gray, is the color seen by the eye in perfect darkness. Even in the absence of light, some action potentials are still sent along the optic nerve, causing the sensation of a uniform dark gray color.
Eigengrau is perceived as lighter than a black...
Paradox
As human knowledge increases, the fraction of human knowledge possessed by any one individual gets ever smaller. This is inevitable. If the trend continues, then, in the limit, human knowledge tends towards infinity and the percentage of human knowledge held by any one individual tends towards zero. In the end, we will know everything and yet nothing.
(This paradox only works when you talk about...
Kowloon
In 1898, the British, who had conquered Hong Kong island some sixty years earlier, signed a 99-year lease with the Chinese that gave them control over the New Territories, an additional strip of land on the mainland. The lease excluded a small military fort called the Kowloon Walled City, a walled military outpost with a small surrounding village. On the terms of the lease, the Chinese were...
4 tags
I love the internet Wayback Machine, but it’s been continually stomping on my narcissistic tendencies by refusing to list any of my websites. The magical thing about the Wayback Machine, though, is that archived pages may turn up long after they have been indexed: you may think a site is lost, but then it turns up in the Machine a year later. Now, finally, it has started listing old...
World Domination Beckons →
Newspaper Club, the wonderful service built on the concept of Things Our Friends Have Written on the Internet 2008, now ships to North America, Australia and Europe. The idea is still awesome, and the execution looks to be as well. Perhaps it’s time to dust off the idea for a Tumblr zine/thing — which I abandoned after 1) realizing how much work it would be and 2) discovering that the...
2 tags
Mysteries
I’m wondering if China Miéville isn’t right, if a bit pompous, when he writes of mysteries:
These are novels of potentiality. Quantum narratives. Their power isn’t in their final acts, but in the profusion of superpositions before them, the could-bes, what-ifs and never-knows.
This is perhaps what makes Lost and every other tv show or novel that relies on a central mystery so...
June 2010
“One night I was sitting on the bed in my hotel room on Bunker Hill, down in the...”
– Thus begins Ask the Dust (1939), by John Fante. It’s almost exactly the same way Hunger starts. Hunger is a million times bleaker. I think I’d prefer living on oranges to living on bark. Ask the Dust has equally many face-slap-the-protagonist-worthy “why oh why must you sabotage...
